Still having problems finding a way into AST for folks, this will be attempt number I don’t know any more, another series, I suppose. The plan is to keep them short and manageable, hope to make the point with a barrage from many angles. I’ll start with the definition for AST – here’s the first, it means Antisocialization Theory – and then how it alters the narrative of a number of topics.
AST redefines everything, but we’ll try to show how, specifically, for this list of ideas:
human nature
social life
punishment
abuse
anger
empathy
relatedness theory
evolution
strength
resilience
etc. Oh, forgot some (and this will be a feature):
racism
trauma and healing, psychology
attention
culture, tradition
control
Redefinitions – 4. Abuse
AST, a definition:
AST is the theory of our hurt, the human science of not deterrent and socialization, but of abuse, punitive and otherwise, and our antisocialization, which long word means exactly what it sounds like it means: to have been made antisocial. It is about the dark side of our social control, the stuff we supposedly don’t want to happen, beyond that the person maybe did what they were bloody well told.
The AST Theory of conflict states that the failures and ostensibly unintended consequences of our rough control are deeply and vastly consequential in human life, and its author can get very expansive, imagining it to be the post powerful and destructive force driving us.
The central idea is that structures and ways of being within the human social group – laws and punishments, ordeals, etc., – add up to pain and trauma for the individual, while laws prohibit simple reactive violence and simple revenge, and so the individual is “charged” with bad feelings, antisocialized and looking for a fight they are allowed to have. The group’s leadership – administrators of the law – can then exploit this reservoir of anger, point it at someone and allow the citizens the “freedom,” not an accident and not irony, we are always seeing this, to deflect and unload their frustrations.
AST asks you to note, that our own people frustrate us, and exploit our frustrations at will in this system, using us to abuse some Other, some human group in a war or a pogrom, or an apartheid. That is what I call the AST theory of conflict, weaponized by our own, to be discharged in some group conflict.
Hmm. Not sure if that will be the one I use every time, but I like it for our first few entries:
AST, “Abuse”
Thinking that if you’re new to the series, at least I hope you read the immediately previous one, “punishment,” they’re really one idea. Thank you.
I try to make the point that the two things, “normal” punishment and outright abuse are the same function, that they both use the same currency, and our designations of what is good and what is bad in it don’t mean anything to the basic science, to the currency, which is pain, and our rather annoying but unavoidable way of letting it change us. The “we all agree” victims, they get some clarity that they were changed, but the rest of us, we are the damaged three quarters people, hurting, but still talking about “deterrents.”
Our parents, the teachers, the preacher, everyone would have us think we have been “deterred,” but not altered, and of course this is only supportable if they never had to “prove” the deterrent to us even once, and only believable in a world that has zero interest in three quarters of the downstream consequences and either likes them or cannot see them.
For the record, it’s sort of half and half, we “don’t like” war, but we worship our warlike “strength.” I am trying to break that down for us.
It’s abuse victims that suffered for a lack of “strength,” and likely fixated upon it as an answer, a solution to their situation at a very young age; it doesn’t seem like something that would look so magical to an older person who already knows about society and police and life and wouldn’t maybe jump to a personal “strength” to solve their real life problems. It’s an abused child’s “go to,” is what it is.
It’s also what Bad Cop Parent already admitted he was doing to us behind the woodshed: here’s your solution kid, personal strength – knowing you will likely grow out of it regarding him, and probably also that he successfully programmed you for life, with a speech that he made that added up to your consent for the whole thing. You sign the form, when you are the parent and start making the same speech.
Call it a spectrum, if you must. A spectrum with the most extreme abuse at one end and nothing but love and food and healthcare at the other and all of life between, but then know that the abuse begins immediately off of the love terminus and increases steadily to the terrible end, where it is all of it and from there the love starts from nothing and increases in the other direction.
But that the power is on the dark side.
That the love on this graphic is a weak thing, the far less powerfully causative thing. I was thinking of the proportions of dark matter, I liked the metaphor and the symmetry, which is what, 85% to 15 % bright matter? – but a trained psychologist told me their rule of thumb, they mentioned an author, I forget, is five to one. Wait, that’s pretty close isn’t it? LOL I was thinking 80/20, I wrote it before I looked at it and saw that is four to one, ha. Hey! Was that Jim Morrison’s Five to One? Probably, huh. Whups. Sorry, back to Bullet, already in progress.
OMG, The old get old and the young get stronger! Stop it!
Where were we. Right.
That it is mostly a graph with one thing on it, abuse, and where there is less of it – this seems to be the secret – even far less, it is nonetheless the causative thing, that the opposing force is . . . nothing. Sort of.
This is why I keep saying “science, damnit!,” because in science, many things exist in a simple gradient, a molecule of abuse won’t make the change, let’s say kill you, but a teaspoon makes you sick and half a litre kills you – hey, this might work.
We talk like Big Tobacco or Big Oil about ourselves, sure it’s toxic at half a litre, but a teaspoon doesn’t hurt! No. We’re sick, and that teaspoonful is the only thing that happened to us. Then we invent creationism, God and Human Nature to explain the effect of the teaspoonful and get rich selling the stuff. We really do, we sound just like that, no wonder the swine get away with it, they’re using our own stupid defense on us. We are Big Abuse, and we are too big to fail.
Proof, you want something new, OK. I tweeted it the other day, but recent and me, still new enough: corrupt, evil, often racist judges rarely face justice, someone said, and I hadn’t gone quite this far before, I mean, I say “spanking is not about teaching, it’s about antisocialization,” a lot, but I guess . . . I guess it means AST calls “justice,” a lie.
If it weren’t, I think we would all imagine some strict code among judges to police one another or something, but instead they remain and exist as bad judges the court staff all know about until retirement or death, and so to the system, clearly, “justice” isn’t the point, the point is how I and AST see it: abuse and punishment are the same in their true, little considered effects of terrorizing and so “strengthening” the population. The innocent and guilty all antisocialize the same.
They are all going to get angry and strong, the innocent and guilty alike.
To the deeper function, antisocialization, humanity driving itself to more and more aggression, it really doesn’t matter if they’re innocent. Half the laws are made up anyway, right? Bill Murray, Meatballs, say it with me: It just doesn’t matter! It just doesn’t matter! I’m sorry, it doesn’t. To suggest it does is to suggest hurting the guilty ones is good for all of us, good for society, and I’m sorry, that particular Elvis has left the building.
That is buying into the excuse, the justification for a world of abuse.
AST says all that is nonsense. Harming the guilty harms us all as much as harming the innocent does, AST finds violence and harm to be bad things, crimes in themselves, unlike regular old bro science, which seems to say, “if they call it a deterrent, it doesn’t count.”
I feel for abuse victims, I’m one, we all are, I just feel for the ones that don’t seem to know they are, and I am trying to solve the problem for the no-one can know how many are to come, born into this system where abuse is normal and legal, and downright bloody mandatory. Don’t read me backwards, I minimize nothing, I am not trying to normalize extreme abuse, I am trying to do the opposite, to re-weird all abuse, spanking and police, because the “normal” bad stuff carries the worst along with it.
To my mind, fighting the worst and ignoring “spanking,” is fighting myself, pulling in both directions, missing the principle. If we accept any abuse, we’ve accepted the false premise and we’re asking for it all, and it’s not really an accident. It’s predictable, with decent science.
Jeff
Cinco de Mayo, 2022
Abuse with an Excuse 